alt.energy.renewable

"Father Haskell" wrote in message
news:d04587f0-d955-4330-b815-bbc9f95cbdae@m34g2000hsc.googlegroups.com...
| On Mar 5, 12:16 pm, Anthony Matonak
| wrote:
| > TMA wrote:
| > > The only example of perpetual motion in nature is the
| > > electro-magnetic wave.
| >
| > Maybe not even that. A physical object, such as a speeding
| > bullet, loses energy and slows down due to friction in the
| > atmosphere. Perhaps electro-magnetic waves experience a
| > kind of ether friction and lose energy as they pass through
| > space. Light waves losing energy would show as red-shifted
| > so the more distant an object (star or galaxy) is in space
| > the more energy the light would have lost getting here and
| > the more red-shifted it would appear.
| >
| > Anthony
|
| If energy is lost, the light would dim, but the color
| would stay the same.

I shudder at such incredible naivety.
Energy is not lost, it is spread over a greater area.
For a photon, E = h(nu) -- Max Planck.

Light travels as photons which are like raindrops. One raindrop
will not make you wet. Many raindrops will.
One raindrop can pass right through an egg slicer,
http://www.ubored.net/images/200px-Eierschneider.jpg
and if it hits a wire it still gets through but can be deflected.
If we have a star emitting light in all directions the total energy
and raindrop-like photons arriving is roughly constant at r for all
r, the photons are spread over an ever increasing surface of
sphere. Far enough away and the photon-raindrops are arriving
at a reduced rate per unit area. The raindrop can also cool
and become a snowflake (which travels more slowly, but still
spreads out from other snowflakes) and when that happens,
the photon is redder.
Max Planck's equation is limited to the special conditions
that the velocity of the photon is constant and so is the area
it falls on. It isn't "wrong" per se, it is what you'll find in a
laboratory, but it doesn't take the conditions you are describing
into consideration.